Dell announced a new step in its strategy of fluid, elastic and flexible storage, part of its ‘Fluid Forward’ concept at the Dell Storage Forum in Paris this week.

It announced five new products that show Dell's commitment to converged infrastructure. Two are related to software enhancements, and the other three are focused on data backup and recovery.

Dell has upgraded its Compellent Storage Center 6.3, for improved performance and scalability for Dell Compellent arrays. This is the first controller of the industry to provide end-to-end 16Gb Fiber Channel capability (from server to switch to storage). It also doubles the bandwidth of the machine and increases performance by 100%, according to Dell.

And it has made improvements to Dell PowerVault MD3 software, which now comes with advanced software features and redundancy. Performance has been increased and virtualization capabilities added - MD3 is designed to achieve 99.999% availability.

Dell also made three announcements around backup and recovery.

It announced Quest NetVault Backup 9.0, which integrates Quest data protection software with NetVault Quest Extended Architecture.

VP and general manager at Dell Storage, Darren Thomas, said Quest Netvault Backup 9.0 can reduce recovery time by 50%.

Dell also unveiled its PowerVault DL2300, an appliance that combines the 12th Dell PowerEdge server generation with CommVault Simpana 9 software to provide simpler data recovery and a breakthrough in speed for both physical and virtual environments.

PowerVault DL2300 comes with 192TB of deduplication storage – twice the capacity of the previous generation PowerVault and allows the management of Dell Compellent, EqualLogic and PowerVault MD storage arrays from one console, which speeds up backup and recovery.

And for the real time restoration of applications and data, it announced Dell PowerVault DL4000, a backup appliance based on AppAssure software which has 5.5 terabytes of storage capacity.

"For those who work with big data, cloud and data insight, this is the technology they are looking for," Thomas said.

While improvements in Dell PowerVault MD3 and Dell PowerVault DL2300 are already available, Dell Quest NetVault Backup 9.0 will be available in December 2012. Customers will have to wait until Q1 of 2013 for Dell PowerVault DL4000 and until Q2 for Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3.

Thomas said Fluid Forward refers to how Dell sees the future when joining together a wide variety of devices and environments.

"The tenets of Fluid Data have been designed to move the business forward, and that is why we are talking about the concept Fluid Forward. Dell Fluid Data is an end-to-end architecture that optimizes the data everywhere to drive business results," Thomas said.

"The philosophy of better together (another catch phrase Dell pushed at the event) is ultimately a vision end-to-end. The data center is a mirror of the business: what happens in the data center also happens in the business.”